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Increasingly, I've heard people say that abortion must be fought on completely secular terms because not everyone's Catholic or Christian. While that's true, I can't help but think that any long term strategy to reduce or eliminate abortions must be based on conversion to Christianity.

I don't see where else the sacredness of life comes into play other than Christianity. So while I once was a pro-life atheist and applaud atheist pro-lifers for seeing the truth that abortion kills a human being I don't think that's a strong basis to go to battle with the forces of death in this country.

I believe conversion is the real answer. I don't believe we can reason our way away from abortion taking millions of lives. Not to sound all hippie but love is the answer. Love is the antidote to abortion. Look, if you have a young girl who's in trouble, you can explain to her that abortion stops a beating heart and all about the fact that her child's DNA is set, but you're not going to save that baby much of the time speaking about science to kids, especially when those kids are terrified. Believe it or not, young people aren't known for making good decisions. That's why they're unmarried and pregnant in the first place, right? Love. That's how you stop abortion.

I truly believe that abortion is not a problem we can legislate our way out of. Mind you, I want to see Roe v. Wade overturned and will work towards that but in the end, abortion increases when Christianity decreases.

Young women must know they're loved by God and they must understand that life is sacred and something to be celebrated, nurtured, and loved even in the most difficult of circumstances.

Lila Rose of Live Action Network understands this. She said recently to CNA News:

“We are in the middle of a great holocaust, great genocide,” she said, “and it’s branded as 'choice,' 'freedom,' 'empowerment.'”

Rose stressed that the fight to end abortion is “a spiritual battle as much as it is a physical battle.”

In fighting the culture of death, she said, “what we need to do is re-catechize ourselves” and turn to prayer and the sacraments.

Faith is critical to Rose, who entered the Catholic Church three-and-a-half years ago. She reflected on her love for the Virgin Mary, the ultimate pro-life model who accepted God’s will for her child with complete love and acceptance.

Action is also an essential part of the fight, she said, explaining that this “can mean a lot of things,” including not only the pro-life work of Live Action and other groups, but also “living out a love of neighbor,” and living a life of integrity, particularly “sexual integrity.”

Above all, Rose emphasized, “the most important thing we can do is pray.”

“We all know that we are very, very weak,” she explained, “but with God, who is all powerful and all strong, anything is possible.”

I love the fact that pro-lifers seem to be the ones embracing science with ultrasounds while pro-aborts wish to keep the contents of the womb a mystery. But the science isn't the answer. The science must serve our cause. Ultrasounds are effective because young women see a baby when they look in the ultrasound. And they can no longer deny what they likely knew in their heart anyway - that a baby is in their womb, not a blob of tissue. Unless they're open to life and love, that baby is done for. We must work to not only make every baby wanted but every mother accepted and loved. Then babies will have a chance.

8 comments:

"I don't see where else the sacredness of life comes into play other than Christianity."

Natural law. Protestants may consider all moral norms to depend on divine revelation; Catholics consider moral norms such as the necessity of defending human life to be accessible in principle to human reason, apart from faith or divine revelation.

Certainly, this moral insight (or any moral insight) may be hard to square with materialistic atheism (I'd say it's impossible). But just because we consider principled pro-life atheists to be inconsistent doesn't mean you need Christianity to get the sacredness of human life.

The President of the United States owns nothing. Obama may own privately but as president, he owns nothing. Taxes are owned by the taxpayers even as they are administered by the administration. All public land and waterways are owned in joint and common tenancy by each and every citizen, you own it all and I own it all.These facts come to bear on the HHS Mandate. Government is using our tax money to fund actions that many people find criminal. Crime cannot be codified or legalized. Therefore, government must acknowledge the private citizens’ exercise of a free conscience to refuse to fund action they find abhorrent. Government must respect and withdraw the private citizens’ tax money from funding of abhorrent deeds. Government cannot impose penalties on citizens for finding criminal deeds abhorrent and for choosing to refrain from contributing their tax money to the support of such crimes.The Supreme Sovereign Being gives man his name: “I AM” when a man is conceived and comes into being. Human existence is the criterion for the objective ordering of human rights. The Creator endows the man with unalienable rights; that among these rights are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Birth gives a man citizenship never to pay tribute to any person but the Person of God. When an atheist says: ““I AM” an atheist”, he contradicts himself. When an atheist is pro-life, he contradicts himself. When an atheist refuses to admit to his immortal soul he confounds himself.

What SDG said. While I personally (having read Nietzsche) consider it irrational for an atheist to believe in natural-law morals, or any other morals beyond pragmatism or aesthetics (Nietzsche's "beyond good and evil" basically bases morality on "cool and lame"), an atheist who did accept natural law morals would have a firm moral basis for opposing abortion.

Indeed, as far as "you can't have it without Christianity" goes, the sacredness of life is more common, if anything, in all the Indian religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism—than it is in Christianity. The only reason there is abortion in Asia is because Buddhism is a monkish religion that tends not to interfere with secular mores (premodern Asians just exposed their newborns rather than aborting their fetuses); nevertheless, most sects of Buddhism will defrock a monk who has anything to do with an abortion.

You're right of course. Abortion isn't the problem. Abortion is a symptom of our hard and evil hearts. It's because we have souls of ice with no identity in Love that we use others and allow ourselves to be used by others through sexual intimacy - the main purpose of which in every animal on earth is to produce offspring.

Only a relationship with the greatest Love in the universe is able to transform our relationships into ones of respect.

As for Sophia's Favourite - Most sects of Buddism will defrock a monk who touches a woman and it ain't out of respect for women honey.

@Thesauros: No, it's because of celibacy. They also defrock monks who act as matchmakers. As for respect for women, "honey", the only East Asian society that ever gave women any legal equality, until Westernization in the late 1800s, was the Goryeo Kingdom in Korea, and it did it explicitly because of Buddhist principles. That's also why the Goryeo king abolished slavery.

And seriously, I meant exactly what my words said, not what you appear to have read in—I didn't mean if a monk fathers a child who is aborted (in which case he is violating his vow of celibacy), I meant if a monk so much as gives directions to an abortion clinic. They do actually take the vow to refrain from doing harm fairly seriously.

Well, there is an atheist, or perhaps more precisely, pro-science answer that doesn't rely on conversion. In order for science to work, you need observers, since science requires observation. Those sane among us realize we aren't the best observers, so we also know the more observers the better, and if you really think it through you want observers who were fed properly, raised by a mother and father, etc... Similarly, anyone seriously trying to draw logical conclusions from evolutionary theory has to take a pro-life, pro-family stance. To do otherwise is to put a serious monkey wrench into the very processes people praise.